Have You Heard of Anonymous?

Pleased to bring you another guest post by blog-star Benjamin Templeton.

- 44 Maagnum




“Have you ever heard of Anonymous?” Sounds like a dumb question, not the title of an entry in a blog. But a group of so-called “hacktivists” (so-called by somebody who has clearly never been enlightened here at Carpe Daemon) who style themselves exactly that are gaining headlines and notoriety around the world.

In December, the Anonymous group launched a “Distributed Denial-of-Service” attack on several banks and other services (I won’t go into the technical details. Stephen Colbert handles that quite well in this 7-minute bit, which I highly recommend). This attack was termed “Operation Payback”, and was launched in response to the deactivation of financial accounts belonging to controversial Wikileaks founder Julian Assange by credit card companies they received government pressure. The websites of MasterCard and Visa both came down on December 8th.

Pensive Julian Assange

More recently, Anonymous attacked Egypt and various other countries in the Middle-East, as the BBC reported. The message is clear: Anonymous is dedicated to the freedom of information, and anybody who messes with that will face the wrath of the Internet.


Mr. Assange’s dedication to transparency is clear and his sincerity admirable. Wikileaks exposes government secrets indiscriminately without clear bias. Moreover, Mr. Assange has never been secretive about his identity; from the time that Wikileaks became a high-profile issue, he was linked to it (which is extraordinary because, by the nature of his activity, almost every government probably hates him).


But is Anonymous really about the noble ideal of free speech, or is it something else? Is Visa likely to reverse its decision (a decision in which they very possibly had little or no real choice) regarding Mr. Assange because its website goes down for a few hours? And who exactly is harmed (or at least inconvenienced) by an attack like that? The answers to those questions make Anonymous seem more like a cyber bully than a democratic paragon. After all, it seems unlikely that the affected Visa and MasterCard customers were responsible for Assange’s legal troubles or even felt particularly strongly about his endeavors.


Anonymous is a group based around the message board “4chan”, a site founded on the premise of anonymity. Anybody can post anything without registering or sharing any information about themselves whatsoever. In this xkcd comic, we see a bit of the absurdity that a group based on the premise of freedom of information would be so secretive. From their website, they instruct members “Consider protecting your name, face and identity for safety's sake.” Who decides what information falls under the exemption of “safety’s sake”?


As somebody who thinks that the Internet is a wonderful thing, I’m pained to see groups like Anonymous abuse their expertise. There is a stereotype of the non-conformist “hacker” (see Maagnum, February 4 2011) embodied by Matthew Broderick’s character in WarGames, who could be construed as a little bit malicious, but is mostly just playing around. These characters don’t want to hurt people, they just believe that the Internet is a free place. However, this image is a bit of an illusion. Groups like Anonymous seem more focused on the power of being able to impose their will on the technological community (which, nowadays, includes almost all of us) and Free Speech is merely a convenient justification.


My point is: think twice about endorsing Internet Free Speech, or we may all be Denied of Service before too long by the cyber-megalomaniacs who claim to be protecting it.